Between 1945 and 1963, the United States and
the Soviet Union danced toward the brink of nuclear war and back
again with alarming frequency. Yet--or so Marc Trachtenberg argues--there
ought to have been a stable, easily-attained Cold Peace in the
twenty years after World War II instead of the Cold War that
we in fact had.

Trachtenberg sees the Soviet Union's strategic
interests in Europe as straightforward: hold what they had gained
during and immediately after World War II for world communism,
prevent the reemergence of an armed, aggressive, eastward-looking
Germany, and wait until--as happened after World War I--inter-capitalist
rivalries dissolved the western allies, their imperialist tensions
led to yet a third round of wars between the imperialist capitalist
powers, and only then move forward to consolidate world revolution.

Trachtenberg sees the western alliance's strategic
interests in Europe as straightforward: deter the Soviet Union
from military adventurism, prevent the emergence of a strong,
aggressive, revanchist Germany, and wait--until the east bloc's
internal contradictions led to a softening of its regime and
an end to the totalitarian threat that Stalin posed.

Both of these strategic interests could, it
seems, be easily obtained. Everyone should accept the division
of Europe, the division of Germany, and the tight bonding of
each piece of Germany to its own allies. And everyone should
wait for social and economic competition--rather than war accompanied
by nuclear devastation--to bring a decision as to which social
and economic system was better for human progress. Such a Cold
Peace would have been accompanied by speeches and debates and
majority resolutions--but not by blood and iron--not by bombers
with nuclear weapons loaded parked on runways on five-minute
alert, not by repeated crises over access to west Berlin and
the location of nuclear-tipped missiles.

So why didn't we have it?

Marc Trachtenberg's answer has two parts.
The first is that the Eisenhower administration sought to get
security on the cheap--to save money relative to what the Truman
administration had planned. Thus Eisenhower wound up with a very
destabilizing strategy for the defense of western Europe: that
the moment war seemed imminent, the United States strategic nuclear
arsenal would be launched to destroy Soviet combat formations,
destroy Soviet logistical infrastructure, destroy Soviet industrial
capacity, and in the process kill at least tens of millions of
people. That the United States was following such a military
strategy and had in fact sought and attained what looked from
Moscow to be the capability to launch a sudden, surprise, devastating,
and decisive first strike had to make leaders in the Kremlin
very, very nervous.

The second part of Marc Trachtenberg's answer
is that another part of the Eisenhower "security on the
cheap" policy involved building up West German military
capacity as fast and as far as they could, and involved binding
West Germany to the rest of NATO by expressing great sympathy
for German wishes for reunification, and perhaps for readjustment
of a united Germany's eastern borders back to locations east
of the Oder-Neisse line at the expense of Poland. This part of
American policy posed a direct threat to the Soviet Union's vital
strategic interests: it was too close to being the re-creation
of the German-superpower-poised-to-strike-at-Russia to be acceptable,
especially if West Germany were to acquire nuclear weapons.

So, according to Marc Trachtenberg, we did
not get a Cold Peace until U.S. strategy changed so that it no
longer posed direct and immediate threats to the Soviet Union.
Once the Soviet Union's nuclear deterrent was large enough to
have a second-strike capability NATO strategy had to shift from
massive and immediate--perhaps preemptive--nuclear war to a more
balanced force posture that contained less of an automatic runup
of the ladder of escalation. Once it became clear that West Germany
was not going to acquire nuclear weapons and that its forces
were effectively contained in the force structures of the Atlantic
alliance, then from Moscow's point of view the U.S. had done
its principal job: keeping the Germans down. And there could
be peace in Europe.

Now I think that there are two potential flaws
in Trachtenberg's argument.

The first is that his picture of U.S. nuclear
strategy in the 1950s seems to me to pick out one thread but
one thread only of what was a confused muddle. It may well be
that NATO force structures in the 1950s were such that a war
against the Soviet Union could be won if and only if NATO struck
hard, immediately, with both all tactical and strategic nuclear
weapons before the Warsaw Pact's initial blows could land. But
logical consistency is not a property of bureaucracies or even
of generals and political leaders. Different people in the bureaucracy
have different views--and advance their views in the documents
they write as if they are settled policy. And people are conflicted.

Thus, for example, Trachtenberg writes--in
his discussion of his argument that NATO strategy in the 1950s
involved "massive preemption--certainly in operational terms,
and to a considerable extent in fundamental strategic terms"
(p. 162)--that "Western leaders, of course, thought of themselves
as the kind of people who would never start a war, and in a number
of documents a strategy of preemption was explicitly ruled out.
But it is hard to take such statements at face value, given both
the logic of the strategy and the many documents that point in
the opposite direction" (p. 164). This seems to me to be
possibly fallacious: Eisenhower and company wanted to win any
war that began by making sure that they caught the Russian planes
on the ground and that NATO planes were not caught on the ground;
Eisenhower and company also did not want to be the ones to start
a war. How this would have worked out in practice is anyone's
guess, but it seems to me a significant overstatement to say
that U.S. doctrine in the 1950s was a doctrine of strategic nuclear
preemption rather than, as Solly Zuckerman called it, a "woolly
and diffuse" muddle (p. 168).

The second is that the Cold War was an ideological
war. Even had the German question and the defense-of-western-Europe
question been solved to everyone's satisfaction in 1948, we still
would have seen the Korean War, the Taiwan question, the East
German riots of 1953, the Hungarian uprising of 1956, and so
on and so forth. Solving the German question would not
have shifted east-west competition into social and economic and
propaganda realms. It would just have eliminated one--albeit
a big one--of the potential flashpoints.

Thus I conclude that Mar Trachtenberg's book
is a very good book. But it is a very good book on the post-WWII
German question and on the role of NATO--which was, as we all
know, to keep "the Russians out, the Americans in, and the
Germans down." It isn't a book on the broader Cold War as
a whole.